Preach it! 🙌⛪

In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold… how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It’s an option, yes, but mandatory?

It does not matter if Linux supports attestation or not, because ultimately the application (or website) will determine if it wants to run on Linux. It’s up to the company developing it’s application or website to determine if they want to support more than windows/Mac.

Graphene has its own variation of attestation (they cryptographically sign requests with their own key - and not googles), but it requires additional hoops for each application - few companies are willing to do this.

Attestation is a wet dream for companies. You don’t need DRM (as the OS will enforce it) and you can be certain your competitors/hackers cannot reverse engineer/pirate your code or run the application in an emulator. And the implementation effort to support it, is as simple as “make function call and check the response”.

Linux will still exist (especially on the server side) and developers will still use it as a desktop machine. However, (as I implied) non-Linux games will stop working, accessing you banks website from linux will be rejected, emulation will cease - it’ll be a corporate paradise… the stocks will go up.

FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene.

Revolut explicitly goes out of their way to not work on Graphene.

I’ve complained, they don’t care. The bean counters have done their risk calculations and decided that the personal data they collect/mine (and the integrity of that data) is worth more than losing a few graphene users.

Also, I’m not sure saying it’s inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won’t make others care about their privacy and security.

You do have a valid point: giving up after trying nothing won’t help. However, I fear there will need to be “government intervention” to allow hardware and software to be “open for everyone”. I’ll admit my bias in wonder how well governments (of late) are representing the best interests of the people. But, these topics are complicated for even technically inclined people - let alone politicians. And the strawman argument against intervention is always going to be “in the name of security”.

From my perspective, the writing is on the wall. This apocalyptic future won’t happen over night, but it will be a slow boil over the next 10 years (or so).

If you’ve got ideas for how to avoid this, I’m all ears.

Nothing I can do to resist?

I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems “not secure enough” (it’s lacking TMP 2.0)

This means you can get a great deal on one of these “inscure pc”… but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. … and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

Currently, many banking apps won’t run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

Gmail? I don’t remember when I opened mine the last time…

Today things like “email reputation” make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better “reputation”.

My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

I suspect they may not try to pull the entire trap closed all at once and that Windows 11 may continue to more or less function as we’ve seen past iterations

Microsoft will be taking a page from Google playbook. Google has be gradually reducing the “openness” of their android platform. They now have these “security checks” enforced on android. Meaning that it’s trivial for an application to determine if the phone a “genuine android” or not.

This’ll trickle into webbrowser too (if it’s not already in browsers like chrome). It’s only a matter of time before web pages will be able to determine if they’re running on a “secure OS” and fail to run. It’ll start out with your banking website, then expand to shopping websites, ultimately every page will enforce it (“oh, I see you have an unauthorized browser plug in installed. We care about your security, therefore we won’t run. Please restore your device to it’s secure defaults.”)

This future is so horrible and Linux with its 4% market share won’t change anything.